Muslim Brotherhood sets up Islamic clerical power

The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's powerful opposition movement, has laid down its first detailed political platform, which would bar women and Christians from becoming president and establish a board of Muslim clerics to oversee the government, reminiscent of Iran's Islamic state.
The platform has dismayed secular reform activists who have cautiously hoped the Brotherhood was becoming more moderate and who supported the movement in the face of a tough government crackdown against it. The document also complicates the debate in Egypt over how to deal with the Brotherhood, which proved its widespread popularity in 2005 parliament elections.
The blueprint illustrated the dominance of a more hard-line trend in the Brotherhood, known as the "Daawi" - Arabic for "preaching" - over a minority of moderates who seek to reform the group and call for a civic government that respects Islamic principles. "It establishes a religious state," Abdel Moneim Said, head of the leading Al Ahram Center for Strategic and Political Studies, said. "Its an assassination to the civic state."
The Brotherhood has been banned since 1954 but its candidates run in elections as independents.